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Article: Muslim Turkistan: Kazak religion and collective memory. (Book Reviews: General).
- Article from:
- Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute
- Article date:
- September 1, 2002
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2002 Royal Anthropological Institute. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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PRIVRATSKY, BRUCE G. Muslim Turkistan: Kazak religion and collective memory. xxi, 321 pp., maps, plates, bibliogr. Richmond, Sy.: Curzon Press, 2001. [pounds sterling]45.00 (cloth)
The book is based on ethnographic fieldwork in the city of Turkistan in Kazakhstan. Its main thesis is that Islam is the cultural stuff of the collective memory among Kazakhs and thereby shapes their identity Privratsky questions the view that the Kazakh religion is a mixture of the Sufi tradition and the old Kazakh shamanism. This view, he argues, which was first established by Shoqan Valikhanov, a Kazakh nineteenth-century ethnographer, has since been the dominant paradigm on Kazakh ...